Bangladesh plans to build special shelters for lost Rohingya children

Bangladesh is planning to build special shelters for 6,000 Rohingya Muslim children who entered the country without parents to escape violence in neighbouring Myanmar, a government official said on Tuesday.

Children make up about 60 percent of the 480,000 Rohingya Muslims who have poured into Bangladesh over the last four weeks to flee persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. 

Junior minister Nuruzzaman Ahmed said that the social welfare ministry has asked local authorities for 81 hectares (200 acres) of land to build facilities for children without parents, and about 1,580 such children have already been registered. 

Zillar Rahman, a senior official at the ministry, said that the government wants to protect such children by keeping them away from adults.

Between the new arrivals and some 300,000 Rohingya who were already living in the area due to previous violence in Myanmar, there are now nearly 800,000 refugees in camps around the Bangladesh border town of Cox's Bazar that are bursting at the seams.

While nearly 30,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have been displaced inside Myanmar since August 25 when the army launched operation against Muslim rebels, an estimated 500 Hindus have fled to Bangladesh.

Most of Myanmar's estimated 1.1 million Rohingya live in northern Rakhine state. 

They face severe persecution in the Buddhist-majority country, which refuses to recognise them as a legitimate native ethnic minority, leaving them without citizenship and basic rights.

Turkish support continues 

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag is in Bangladesh to speed up Turkish support – both political and material – for Rohingya in Bangladesh.

Turkey has been at the forefront of providing aid to Rohingya refugees and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan highlighted the issue at this year's UN General Assembly.

Earlier on Tuesday, the UN Security Council met behind closed doors to discuss the violence in Myanmar in what has been condemned as "ethnic cleansing" of Rohingya Muslims. 

The meeting will set the stage for a public session of the top UN body on Thursday, during which UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is set to brief on the crisis and China, along with other council members, will deliver remarks.

Myanmar team to visit Bangladesh for talks

A Myanmar team will arrive in Bangladesh next week to discuss the mass exodus of Rohingya, a Bangladeshi official said on Tuesday, amid huge diplomatic efforts to find a durable solution to the crisis.

The team is "coming early next week," Bangladesh's Foreign Secretary Shahidul Haque said, adding they would be working on the Rohingya issue but gave no further details.

A senior foreign ministry official said that the team was expected to be led by Myanmar's Minister of the Office of State Counselor, Kyaw Tint Swe.

Dhaka had earlier invited the minister for talks before the latest eruption of violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state triggered one of the world's worst refugee crisis in recent decades.